Hard drive to hard drive transfer?

For the past couple of weeks my hard drive has been making a wierd noise on start up, and is running noticably slower. I'm a little worried that it's going to die on me, and I'm planing on getting a new hard drive to replace it. I was wondering if there was any way to make a copy of my present hard drive onto my next one when I purchase it?

I am looking at these two hard drives, and I was wondering if anyone had any experience with them or had any others to reccomend.

I have that first harddrive, died on me after about 3 years. I'd get the Maxtor, ATA133 is faster and my 40GB Maxtor is still spinnin'.

Is your harddrive that is acting up the one with the OS on it? If so, you'll have to re-install the OS, you can't simply copy it over. Files and such however should just be able to copy over, practically drag and drop...might take a while though.

It's an 80gb, and I have about 40gb in use, so it would take quite a few cd's to hold all the information. I have found a way to clone the hard drive, so now I would just like some suggestions on which hard drive to buy. I don't really need much more then 80gb, so unless it's a really good deal, let stick with 80gb.

Grab another hard disk and a DOS copy of Ghost. You can boot from a CD or floppy, then run ghost off of a floppy and clone the old disk onto the new one. There's an option to force cloning even if parts of the disk are unreadable.

If you get a retail version of the HDD it'll come with a CD that you can boot from.
Put the new drive in as the Slave.
Tell the CD software that the new HDD is to be the new boot drive when it formats it. The CD will then format the drive and automatically afterwards to a disc-to-disc copy.
Then just yank out the bad drive and set the new to Master and you're done.

I know that WD has their website the some software you can download and put on a floppy, maybe a CD, and I think can do the same thing.

The only other idea I have that would work is to after the new drive is formatted, but from a LiveCD OS like Knoppix or make a BartPE disc, and you can do a drag&drop copy disc-to-disc and in theory that should work...but don't quote me on it because I've never done that with the OS before.

Grab another hard disk and a DOS copy of Ghost. You can boot from a CD or floppy, then run ghost off of a floppy and clone the old disk onto the new one. There's an option to force cloning even if parts of the disk are unreadable.

@shauze
If you're asking everyone which brand of HDD to get, don't. It's not worth to time to hear everyone bullsh*t a** heartbreak stories over what brands they have had problems it. It doesn't matter.
I use Maxtor, what to know why? Too bad it doesn't matter. I'm not about to tell you my hard luck story with any other brands.

You want to know how to know which brand to pick? Look at the drive you have now and then answer these questions...
How old is it?
Have you had any problems with during the time you've had, not including now?

If the answer to the first is; 4+years. Good
If the answer to the second is; none. Good
Guess what, you've just figured out which brand to go with.
Why 4 years? Because large drives now will be much much cheaper in 4 years. You've got about $55-60 to spend on a new drive, right? And as you can see the most you can get is 80GB. In 4 years you'll be able to spend the same amount of money and get 160GB, 120GB easily.
It's only been 2 years and the drive I got back then is $80 less today.